River City Memoirs: Rudolph rafter Rezin wrestles brave Hiram

He was born under the name Hiram, and you could call him that though he wouldn't like it.

As a young adult, Hiram hated the family business in Ohio, so his father sent him to West Point for a military career.

Graduating without distinction, brave Hiram performed acceptably in the Mexican War of 1846-48 and served until his resignation in 1854 under allegations of binge drinking.

Hiram failed at serial ventures in the St. Louis area, finally resorting to selling firewood on the street. In 1860, his father brought him, then 38 and married with four children, back to the family tannery, by then in Galena, Ill.

Then, Hiram was supervised by his two younger brothers as he waited on customers and filled orders. Muscular and sturdy, he had "throwers' forearms" and was the only brother who could heft frozen 250-pound hides.

After weighing and tossing a couple monster steer skins, Hiram would wash his hands and resume his favored position of reclining in a chair, feet on the counter.

Hiram also had duties as a teamster, at which he was expert and apparently found himself transporting goods by means of the Fever River that had made Galena an important commercial center.

That's how he met a guy from here.

The July 21, 1900, Grand Rapids Tribune related the adventure of Dan Rezin, then a 70-year-old farmer in the town of Rudolph.

The story had taken place 40 years earlier, when Rezin had been one of that romantic species called "river pilot."

His task was to guide immense rafts of lumber from sawmills near Rudolph down the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers to Galena, Dubuque and St. Louis, a "rough and precarious existence engaged in only by men of unusual courage and hardihood."

For several hundred miles, Rezin couldn't leave his lumber raft as he endeavored to evade rocks, whirlpools and dangerous rapids. When a stretch of calm water came, he could nap for a couple hours, sometimes only to wake and find the expanse of pine beached on an island or sandbar.

In the summer of 1860, Rezin was guiding his lumber into the mouth of the Fever as it entered the Mississippi from Galena, when he encountered Hiram coming his way in a flatboat.

According to Rezin, the same Hiram had the reputation of being the roughest and toughest brawler up and down the Mississippi. His meetings with lumber drivers were frequent, and brave Hiram always emerged victorious in hand-to-hand combat.

Where Rezin and Hiram met, the channel was narrow and a dispute arose over right of way.

"After exchanging all the epithets for which river men are famous, it was decided to have it out on the bank," said the 1900 account, "whither they repaired, several men who chanced to be in the neighborhood accompanying them to see the sport and make certain of fair play."

Rezin, 30, was taller, younger and weighed less than his stocky antagonist with those big forearms, but our boy was a hardy Irishman, clever with the boxing gloves or in a "catch-as-catch-can" wrestling match.

First, it seemed Rezin would be pounded into insensibility, but then he recharged and gave as good as he got. For an hour the contest waged fast and furious, until both men were forced to relinquish from sheer exhaustion.

They shook hands, Rezin said, and were good friends from that time forward.

At the time of the story, Rezin was "three score and ten years of age, possessed of all his faculties and going about his work with the suppleness of a man half his years."

The 1900 Tribune said Rezin was fond of story telling, "and of his long list there is none he likes better to repeat than his fight with the great American general-Ulysses S. Grant."

Yes, brave Hiram Ulysses Grant had changed his name to Ulysses Simpson Grant.

Hiram's temporary home, Galena, the town that traded supplies for our lumber remains one of the best-preserved historic downtowns in the Midwest. The most lauded landmark in Galena is the home he was given in 1865 for leading the Union armies to glory and where he lived until he was elected President in 1868.

Dave Engel is a local historian, author of history books in the River City Memoirs series and a former Daily Tribune journalist. His columns are a monthly feature in the Daily Tribune.

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River City Memoirs: Rudolph rafter Rezin wrestles brave Hiram

He was born under the name Hiram, and you could call him that though he wouldn't like it.

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